---
title: "Ten years of open source: a stained-glass view"
description: "ClickHouse’s ten-year open-source history is presented through a stained-glass analogy: many contributors remain visible as distinct pieces, while shared infrastructure holds the project together. The article connects that community account to production use through cBioPortal at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where moving heavy filtering into ClickHouse SQL made relevant paths about ten times faster, changing waits from minutes to seconds and supporting continued exploration. It also describes a demonstration built from bare-clone git history, one month of GH Archive events, and the shipped system.contributors table, all queried in ClickHouse. The account reports 100,000 issues and pull requests crossed on March 19, 2026, with 83% of issues and 99% of pull requests resolved at the time of the talk, and presents contributor credit and repair as operating parts of the project."
---

# Ten years of open source: a stained-glass view

[Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse) · Jun 19, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

ClickHouse’s ten-year open-source history is presented through a stained-glass analogy: many contributors remain visible as distinct pieces, while shared infrastructure holds the project together. The article connects that community account to production use through cBioPortal at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where moving heavy filtering into ClickHouse SQL made relevant paths about ten times faster, changing waits from minutes to seconds and supporting continued exploration. It also describes a demonstration built from bare-clone git history, one month of GH Archive events, and the shipped system.contributors table, all queried in ClickHouse. The account reports 100,000 issues and pull requests crossed on March 19, 2026, with 83% of issues and 99% of pull requests resolved at the time of the talk, and presents contributor credit and repair as operating parts of the project.

## Context

The article marks ten years of ClickHouse as an open-source project and seeks to describe how many contributors, kinds of work, public activity, infrastructure, and shipped acknowledgments become one durable project without reducing the history to a single hero story. It also addresses the need for fast analytics in cBioPortal, where slow database queries had caused researchers to stop exploring.

## Approach / What changed

The article uses stained glass as its organizing analogy and examines the project through production impact, git history, GitHub’s public archive, and the system.contributors table shipped with ClickHouse. It describes loading commit and event data into ClickHouse, querying all three sources with the same engine, moving cBioPortal filtering into SQL, and comparing contributor lists between releases. It also presents the Champions program as recognition for already-public community work, with names shown only when contributors consent.

## Takeaways

- Moving heavy cBioPortal filtering into ClickHouse SQL made relevant paths about ten times faster; the source contrasts earlier waits of a minute or more with answers in seconds.
- The demonstration combines one row per commit from a ClickHouse bare clone, one month of hourly GH Archive events, and contributor acknowledgments shipped in system.contributors.
- At the time of the talk, 83% of issues and 99% of pull requests were resolved; the article treats repair and closure as necessary to sustaining an open-source project.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance)

- Source: [Clickhouse](https://clickhouse.com/blog/ten-years-of-open-source-a-stained-glass-view)
- Source URL: https://clickhouse.com/blog/ten-years-of-open-source-a-stained-glass-view
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-29T01:35:58.333Z

[Read original post](https://clickhouse.com/blog/ten-years-of-open-source-a-stained-glass-view)